The scathing criticism and condemnation by the Italian company engaged on the construction of a road between Zebbug and Rabat, Fratelli Basilotta, of the highly irregular manner in which roads were constructed under the Socialist administration in the Seventies, brought to my mind the fact that at that time I too formed part of the Roads Section of the Public Works.

With the advent of Lorry Sant as Minister of Works, the level of road construction took a turn for the worse. Previously, roads were being constructed in accordance with the rules and tenets of highway engineering, with the removal of the subsoil and filling in with organic-free material, well-watered and rolled, then strata of differently sized gravel, likewise wellwatered and rolled before the final top coats were laid.

But know-all Lorry Sant changed all this, with peremptory orders that the organic subsoil should generally be left in place and covered to form a harder surface - exactly as discovered by the Italian contractors, in the course of reconstructing such roads built in the Seventies.

Naturally the director and his high echelon and entourage were likewise to blame for throwing overboard their technical knowhow and accepting such ludicrous impositions with servile submission for reasons best known to themselves, which however, are not so difficult to fathom in those years of terror.

In our case, as site engineers, occupying the lowest engineering rank in the department, it would have been suicidal to ignore the minister's directives, thereby risking possibly being charged with a view to being dismissed for having wasted precious time, materials and public money in constructing the road as it should have been built, rather than in accordance with the minister's directives.

Although I spent only less than two years in the Roads Section in the early Seventies, it is clear from Fratelli Basilotta's statement that this situation continued well into 1979, the year in which the road whose construction was criticised, was apparently built.

Ad maiorem LoriSanti lodilaudem.